The bullying of academics follows a pattern of horrendous, Orwellian elimination rituals, often hidden from the public. Despite the anti-bullying policies (often token), bullying is rife across campuses, and the victims (targets) often pay a heavy price.
"Nothing strengthens authority as much as silence." Leonardo da Vinci - "All that is necessary for evil to succeed is that good men [or good women] do nothing." Edmund Burke

May 29, 2014

Seventy of the UK’s universities spent a total of nearly £19 million
over four years on settling employment disputes, with a lawyer warning
that higher education was spending more than employers in many other
sectors in defending claims.

Figures obtained by Times Higher Education
under the Freedom of Information Act show that, in addition, 50
universities spent £10.4 million over four years on external lawyers’
fees to fight employment claims.

THE asked 125 UK
universities how many employment disputes and tribunals they had been
involved in between 2010 and 2013, and how much they had paid to settle
or fight those cases. The 75 universities that provided figures on
dispute numbers had been involved in a total of 1,331 disputes and 210
tribunals across the four years: an average of 4.3 disputes and 0.7
tribunal cases per institution per year.

The 70 universities that
provided figures on the cost of settling claims, either before or after a
tribunal hearing, had paid a total of £18.6 million: an average of
£66,400 per institution per year. The average payout was £15,600 per
case.

Cranfield University paid out the largest total amount over
the four years: £1.44 million. It also had the fourth highest number of
disputes – 52. The university declined to comment when contacted by THE.

The
University of Gloucestershire paid out £1.17 million, including
£707,000 in 2012 alone. A spokesman for the university said: “This was a
period of restructuring. The majority of the [payments] related to
contractual redundancy and pay in lieu of notice entitlements.” Three institutions were not involved in any disputes, and five paid out no compensation. The
University of Oxford was involved in the largest number of disputes –
67 – but just one employment tribunal. Its total settlement payment of
£210,000 was only the 29th highest. Loughborough University was involved in the most tribunal cases, 15, but paid out only £5,000 in total.

Rob
Cuthbert, emeritus professor of higher education management at the
University of the West of England and chair of the Improving Dispute
Resolution Advisory Service for Further and Higher Education (Idras),
cautioned that those institutions reporting the highest numbers might
just be “the most assiduous” about classifying “disputes”.

“In
particular, I would want to know more about the large institutions
reporting little or no spending, which seems improbable,” he said.

THE
also asked universities how much employment disputes had cost them in
terms of the time of legal and human resources staff. No university was
able to provide an internal breakdown, but 50 reported spending on
external lawyers totalling £10.4 million. The average spending was
£12,200 per case, although four institutions did not spend anything on
lawyers’ fees.

The highest average cost per case – £69,200 – was
incurred by Royal Holloway, University of London. Manchester
Metropolitan University spent the highest total amount on lawyers: £1.84
million, amounting to £41,700 per case.

Helen Scott, executive
officer of Universities HR, the professional organisation for
universities’ human resources staff, said: “The level of disputes and
payouts remains low compared with many other sectors. The higher
education sector accounted for only 0.06 per cent of employment tribunal
cases in the past four years.”

But Christopher Mordue, a partner
at Pinsent Masons and head of its university employment team, said the
statistics suggested that the average total cost of employment disputes
within higher education was greater than in other sectors.

He
noted that the average total cost per dispute – including both
settlement and legal fees – was in excess of £25,000. “That looks on the
high side…and is certainly much higher than the median awards made by
tribunals even in discrimination cases,” he said.

He suggested
this may be a result of the complexity of higher education claims –
which frequently involve various categories of discrimination – and the
fact that many occur while the claimant is still employed. These were
often settled by the employee agreeing to resign, requiring “a higher
settlement figure than would be needed simply to settle the claim in
isolation”.

Mr Mordue also noted that the proportion of dispute
cases in higher education that proceed to a tribunal – 16 per cent – is
significantly lower than the 27 per cent figure for all tribunal cases
in 2011-12: “That could indicate that universities are more risk-averse
than other employers…However, it is just as likely that [it] reflects
the fact that…the cost of defending the claim is often disproportionate
to what is really at stake if you lose, making it more cost-effective to
settle.”

But he added that there are “cases where, despite the
cost, the right thing to do is to fight the claim – for example, on a
point of principle, or to defend the managers involved or to avoid
creating a claims culture”.

He advised universities to decide
early on a fixed total of how much they were willing to spend defending
claims and make a “robust assessment of the likely outcome of the case”,
including how much compensation might be awarded.

He also noted
that the total cost of disputes fell significantly in 2013, and he
expected that trend to continue given recent changes to the tribunal
system, such as the introduction of fees for claimants.
Gill
Evans, emeritus professor of medieval theology and intellectual history
at the University of Cambridge and chief executive of Idras, said
lodging a tribunal case had previously been the standard negotiating
tactic for disgruntled staff, but the new administration fee and the
risk that they might become liable for costs if they lost – which was
the most common outcome – no longer made it advisable.

“There is
not much correlation between what the employee ‘deserves’ and what
happens to them,” she said. “The ones who win and stay [employed] are
the few with a lot of resilience and some supportive advice.”

At last somebody exposed the extent of the waste. Note that the above refers only to the period between 2010 and 2013, and only to 75 universities in the UK. What would the figure be if all universities declared what happened the last ten years? What did the union ever do about it? What will the government do about it?

Suggestion: Protect from legal action all those who signed a compromise agreement and let them state openly a) the conditions under which they were victimised, and b) what they were paid for compensation.

May 22, 2014

From the statement by Capilano University(a public university in North Vancouver, British Columbia):

Late last week, an effigy of the University President, produced by George Rammell, was removed from campus on my direction.

The effigy has been repeatedly displayed on and off campus and online
over the last year. The decision to remove the effigy was not taken
lightly, but rather was the result of endeavouring to find the right
balance among many competing values.

Our University is committed to the open and vigorous discourse that
is essential in an academic community, the inherent value of artistic
expression, and the rights to free speech and protest that all Canadians
enjoy. No one wants Capilano to be a place where art is arbitrarily
removed or censored.

We must also be mindful of the University’s obligations to cultivate
and protect a respectful workplace in which personal harassment and
bullying are prohibited. These obligations are reflected in our
employment policies, as well as legislation. Our policies are intended
to protect the interests of all individuals in our community — including
our president, as well as our faculty and all others.

I am satisfied that recently the effigy has been used in a manner
amounting to workplace harassment of an individual employee, intended to
belittle and humiliate the President. This led me, as Board Chair, to
take action.

I understand that the University’s Administration has offered to give
Mr. Rammell the effigy. The condition attached to this is that it not
be returned to campus, and I fully support that position.

At British Columbia’s Capilano University, the
administration seized a sculpture [titled Blathering On in Krisendom]
caricaturing the university president on the grounds that it constituted
“harassment” of President Kris Bulcroft.

The Capilano instructor who created the sculpture, George Rammell,
said that the artwork, which depicts Bulcroft and her poodle as
ventriloquist dolls wrapped in an American flag, was removed from the
university’s studio art building without his knowledge on the night of
May 7….

President Bulcroft has come under heavy criticism for her decision
last year to cut several programs, including the studio arts program,
for which Rammell teaches, and textile arts. British Columbia’s Supreme
Court ruled in April that the Capilano administration had acted contrary
to the province’s University Act in making the cuts to courses and
programs without seeking the advice of the Capilano Senate. The
university is considering an appeal.

“The sculpture was really made out of a need to respond to my feeling
of being violated,” said Rammell. “In Canada we used to be able to make
caricatures of politicians and they would have a good laugh over their
morning coffee.” …

Steven C. Dubin, a professor of arts administration at Columbia
University’s Teachers College who studies art and censorship, described
the Capilano administration’s decision to remove the sculpture as
“pathetic.”

I think universities should have considerable discretion about what
is displayed at the university, at least in places where only a few
things get to be displayed (as opposed to places deliberately open to
all students or all student groups to display their own views) — just as
universities should have considerable discretion over whom they invite
to give lectures (as opposed to whom student groups invite). I don’t
know enough about the nature of this particular space to opine further.

But the claim that this is legally required to prevent “harassment”
— and indeed the very labeling of such speech as “harassment,” a term
with legal consequences — strikes me as much more troubling; it
suggests, for instance, that a university that chose to tolerated such
speech was acting illegally, or perhaps even that an individual who
engages in such speech could be sued or prosecuted. And unfortunately,
the vague and potentially broad term “harassment” has indeed been at
times read to cover such political criticism, whether we’re talking
about workplace harassment or criminal harassment,
even in the United States, with our considerably more forceful
free-speech protections. Argument such as Capilano University’s
therefore pave the way for suppression of speech far beyond just a
university’s decision about which sculptures to have displayed on
campus.

And this helps illustrate my concern with new American proposals — which include criminal punishments — to ban “harassment and bullying.”
They of course arise in response to very bad behavior, often behavior
that seems to have little or no social value. But by using such
potentially broad, ill-defined terms, they risk outlawing a much broader
range of speech, especially given that people who disapprove of some
speech will have a strong incentive to try to shoehorn it into these
broad and vague categories.

May 03, 2014

Here is my story of academic abuse from the US. (This is in case it hasn't reached your group already).

Research Tech:

After
completing my MS, I joined a multi-investigator lab at an Ivy league
Univ. I thought that only hard work would matter. I worked diligently,
long hours and never questioned my PI as I was just made to feel and
told that I am just a technician. I kept telling myself that my hard
work/publications will show. He put me as first author on national and
international presentations that only he attended while I slogged away
in the lab. I generated a lot of publishable data. During the two years
in the lab, my work started getting published in high impact factor
journals without my knowledge or any mention of me. I was involved in at
least 5 "high reward" projects during my time there. The bullying was
too severe and I was young. I mustered the courage and reported this to
the HR after I received no response on this issue from my immediate PI
and the other investigators in the lab. I had to subsequently report
this to the people high up in the institution (Dean and provost). The
result of all this was "squat". I was forced to withdraw my case and
left with a mere acknowledgment that couldn't justify my efforts. I was
given enough threats that I had to run as far as I could from that
research area and the institution. I must add that during my stay there,
I witnessed a lot of other unethical situations. My friend and
colleague (also a technician then) was fired for looking into other
opportunities on the side. They came to know of her job hunting when
someone reached out to the lead investigator for a reference. I also
witnessed a long legal battle with a courageous scientist who stated
that they had been publishing fabricated data. They ultimately blamed an
unsuspecting foreign postdoc for it. They ruined the postdoc's career.

Grad School:

I moved onto grad school shortly thereafter at a nearby institution. I
was asked to do a couple of rotations before picking a lab. The first
lab was micromanaged by the PI and had alpha female grad students. The
PI offered me the position but I refused politely. Out of vengeance for
being turned down by a lowly grad student, she reported my stay in her
lab as "does not get along well with lab mates but very talented". The
grad students in her lab left no stone unturned in ruining my reputation
either. I settled down in the lab of a young and promising assistant
professor's lab. I was honest and informed him of my mishap at the Ivy
League Institution. In this lab everything was fine in the lab as long
as the teacher's pet a sassy bully grad student was happy. Everyone
feared this grad student and they watched to not offend her. Those who
did were burned badly. One day, I took my chances because I had had
enough. All hell broke loose when I made a minor comment to her in
retaliation. Everyone isolated me in the lab for fear of being ridiculed
by this high school bully. My lab mates got onto social media to
ridicule me. I came to know of this and informed my PI with proof as it
was unacceptable to me. My PI held a lab meeting and everyone ambushed
me and my PI pretty much showed me the door. From then on, I put my head
down and worked. I worked so hard that other faculty members in the
dept. would stop me in the hallway and tell me that it was unethical of
my PI to make me work that hard.

My
project was brand new. I built up all the techniques and guided
everyone in the lab on it. My PI conducted a new lab course as part of
his tenure package and got me to TA for it. It was a course structure
that would have not worked from the get go. It was a genetic screen he
meant to have accomplished by undergrads over a period of two months. I
was the only TA. Of course the course failed and I got royally blamed
for it. He did not even let me take some time off to visit my ailing
mother back home in my home country as she underwent surgery with only
my ailing dad by her side. His exact words were "what will happen to all
the TA money you are getting for this course"? I confided in someone in
the department regarding the reason for the failure of his course. Word
got out and I faced my PI's wrath for the rest of my grad school. I
wasn't sent to any conferences, he ensured I never published. He allowed
other foreign grad students to go home but not me. He got their papers
published in techniques that I taught them. I put my head down once
again and worked. My project turned out to be the only successful
project in the lab and the PI received his first NSF funding. Guess
what? he did not even invite me for the lab grant success party. My only
way out was to prove myself and my worthiness during committee
meetings. I shone each time and my mentor could not play his games
there. My committee and faculty members in the department saw that I was
actually smarter than my PI.

Sometime
in between years two and three with my mentor, we ran into bad luck
with a PI from a competing lab who was doing the exact same thing but
using a route "B". So we decided to "join hands"/"collaborate". This has
had its fair share of issues with the competing PI bullying my own
advisor! This paper got rejected twice already from a top and mid-impact
factor journal (but of course!). I fulfilled everything I could and
tried to wrap up and managed to receive his blessings. During this time,
I reported another unfortunate incident to my PI that he should have
acted on immediately based on the nature of the incident. He chose to
look the other way. I informed the next in command in the department
regarding this incident and alarms were raised immediately. It was such a
serious issue that the school did everything to fix the situation and
in due course of investigation my PI got pulled up. Of course my PI was
saved and forgiven. So there goes my relationship with him yet again! I
had to find a postdoc soon and graduate. This was going to be difficult
with my profile as there is years of training and still no publication!

Postdoc:

I was finally filled with excitement to receive a postdoc position in a
cutting-edge research area. It was too good to be true and I was
overjoyed. I did everything in that lab right. The PI turned out to be
the worst form of micromanager. Everyone was involved with reporting
everything to him when pushed against the wall. What we did, what we
said, where we went and for how long. It was a no sitting, no reading
and all work kind of a lab. It was slowly revealed to me that this PI
had a bad reputation and I was advised by some senior postdocs from
other labs to leave. I didn't pay attention to these warnings until it
happened to me! I tried to report to him the misconduct from a grad
student. My postdoc PI looked the other way too because he worked in
close collaboration with the PI of the grad student in question. What I
got in turn was hours worth of verbal abuse behind close doors because I
had heard and knew way too much about him and I was getting in way of
his collaboration. I kept quiet went through the whole ordeal and left
for home. The PI realized probably he shouldn't done what he did, out of
saving his face, he contacted my PhD mentor and all my committee
members to ruin my reputation and said "she did not get along with lab
members and is not fit for collaborative research" and "please do not
give her a good reference". She is not as good as I was told she would
be. He personally wrote to me barring me from future employment with the
center as well. I found out later that my PhD mentor had been in
constant touch with my postdoc PI for the three weeks that I served as
my postdoc in his lab. I ran back to my PhD mentor knowing everything he
had done and did in the past, begging him to not sit on the manuscripts
I already wrote. I was told that my manuscripts were the last of his
pile of things to read!!!! I was advised by him to take time off and
have a family or move on to the industry.

Please advise:

Should
I still stay in academia? Is this happening to only me? How should I
have handled situations in the past? Should I continue with my postdoc
search given that my publication record does not exactly indicate my
productivity and I cannot attach my story as a separate document with my
CV. The abuse in academia has broken me. Is there any hope?

University
counselling staff and workplace health experts have seen a steady
increase in numbers seeking help for mental health problems over the
past decade, with research indicating nearly half of academics show symptoms of psychological distress.

Culture of acceptance
A recent blog on the Guardian Higher Education Network blog,
which highlighted a "culture of acceptance" in universities around
mental health issues, has received an unprecedented response, pointing
to high levels of distress among academics.

The article, which
reported instances of depression, sleep issues, eating disorders,
alcoholism, self-harming, and even suicide attempts among PhD
students, has been shared hundreds of thousands of times and elicited
comments outlining similar personal experiences from students and
academics. But while anecdotal accounts multiply, mental health
issues in academia are little-researched and hard data is thin on the
ground.

However, a study published in 2013
by the University and College Union (UCU) used health and safety
executive measures, assessed against a large sample of over 14,000
university employees, to reveal growing stress levels among academics
prompted by heavy workloads, a long hours culture and conflicting
management demands. Academics experience higher stress than those in the
wider population, the survey revealed.

Tackling perfectionism

Pat
Hunt, head of Nottingham University's counselling service for staff and
students and a member of the UK body for heads of university
counselling services, said all universities were experiencing an
increase in mental health problems.

"There are increasing levels
of anxiety, both generalised and acute, levels of stress, of depression
and levels of what I would call perfectionism," she says.

"By that
I mean when someone is aiming for and constantly expecting really high
standards, so that even when there is a positive outcome they feel they
have fallen short. So instead of internal aspiration helping them to do
well it actually hinders them."

Academics are also caught up in a
range of cycles, from league tables and student satisfaction surveys to
research league tables, that dominate thinking, she adds. In one case, a
department's top position in a research profile "became a poisonous
thing because everyone then fights to maintain that". Hunt said
higher education should not be stigmatised for the increase in mental
health issues, since it reflected a similar increase in wider society.
Figures show more working days are now lost to the mental health
problems than any other health issue.

Nottingham offers one-to-one
and group help to students and staff, including support specifically
targeted at men, who make up only a third of those seeking help, a
figure likely to reflect the continuing stigma over seeking help for
mental illness.

He says: "They all have to produce results – you are
only as good as your research rating or as good as your ability to bring
in funding for research."

Swann says most academics are stressed
rather than mentally unwell: "They are thinking about their work and the
consequences of not being as good as they should be; they're having
difficulty switching off and feeling guilty if they're not working seven
days a week."

Academics and researchers can become isolated and not realise how "out of kilter" their working lives are, he says.

The
intense pressure of doctoral and post-doctoral study, and early-career
academia can also reveal existing mental health problems, he adds.
Universities, including Imperial, have improved systems to help, yet
academia remains "pretty macho".

Uncaring academic environment

"There's
still a degree of 'if you can't stand the heat, you shouldn't be
here'," says Swann. He says there are "still people in senior positions
in academia who actually don't care".

He adds: "But there are
measures to counter that and there has been a lot of change for the
good. What we have not been able to get rid of are the external
pressures from government funding and the academic marketplace."

Research
by Gail Kinman, professor of occupational health psychology at the
University of Bedfordshire, on behalf of the UCU, offers one of the few
pieces of data on mental health problems among academics.

Kinman
used the health and safety executive's health and safety at work
framework to assess the views of some 20,000 academics, and found
"considerably higher" levels of psychological distress than in the
population as a whole.

She points to poor work-life balance as a
key factor, with academics putting in increasing hours as they attempt
to respond to high levels of internal and external scrutiny, a fast pace
of change and the notion of students as customers – leading to demands
such as 24-hour limit for responses to student queries.

Internalised values hard to shake

There
are examples of good practice within universities which could be shared
across the sector, Kinman says, but, as an independently-minded group
who are strongly committed to their work, academics are not always
straightforward to support. "We don't like being told 'you can't email
at two in the morning'. You can't impose solutions from other sectors –
academics are quite different and there's no 'one size fits all'."

And
internalised values are hard to shake. Nadine Muller, lecturer in
English literature and cultural history at Liverpool John Moores
University, suggests that academia promotes the blurring of lines
between the personal and the professional – often described as "doing
what you love".

"This means that doctoral and early-career
scholars are seldom trained in how to firmly draw that line and value
themselves beyond their work," says Muller.

"Negative
and inflexible attitudes can often exclude those with mental health
conditions from being able to do their job. Often these attitudes can
intimidate a person away from feeling able to disclose their mental
health condition at all."

John Hamilton, head of safety, health
and wellbeing at Leeds Metropolitan University, says academics' problems
are often a question of burnout, which he defines as a "significant
disengagement" with an employer, in which a staff member no longer feels
in charge of their role. Some universities, including his own,
are working hard to offer support, he says, but while many could
"definitely do more", there remains a fundamental problem that some
academics simply do not like the changes in their sector that have taken
place over the last 20 years. "For some, it's going to be a case of
'I'm sorry, but this is the way it is, this is the political landscape'.
So there's an element of putting up with it."

If academics
already in post must wrestle with the stresses of fast change, what of
their successors? Edward Pinkney, a mental health consultant working in
education, says: "Institutions have a broader civic duty to educate
potential academics about the university environment, so that
prospective academics can make a more informed decision about whether or
not to proceed.

"As universities become increasingly
businesslike, there's a growing need for them to be independently
monitored to ensure that they are not just meeting basic standards of
support for their members, but also that they are providing an accurate
representation of academic life and not misselling it."

Join the Bullied Academics Yahoo Group

Useful and informative Links

• Bad Apple Bullies - If you work as a teacher in Queensland, a Bad Apple Bully principal can destroy your health and your career with malicious gossip and secret sticky-notes.

---

• Bully Online - Those who can, do. Those who can't, bully. Bully OnLine is the world's leading web site on workplace bullying and related issues which validates the experience of workplace bullying and provides confirmation, reassurance and re-empowerment.

• Suppression of dissent - The general field of "suppression of dissent" includes whistleblowing, free speech, systems of social control and related topics. The purpose of the site is to foster examination of these issues and action against suppression. It is founded on the assumption that openness and dialogue should be fostered to challenge unaccountable power.

---

• The Workplace Bullying Institute is the sole United States organization dedicated to the eradication of workplace bullying through public education, help for individuals, employer solutions and legislative advocacy.